I’m going to write a book about decluttering one of these days. Not a quirky, object-fetishizing one like Marie Kondo’s, though I re-read that book every year or so. Kondo’s book cheers me up because it is so strange, and because her reverence for the spiritual essence of various objects sheds light on my own obsessions. And I won’t write anything like the various how-tos I have read over the years, including how to organize, how to dispose of or things responsibly, or even the how-to-function books like How To Keep House While Drowning.
No, I want to write a book about flinging things into the void.
Most books and online sites about clearing things out of your life are intensely moral in one way or another, even the subreddit about living in a car. Somehow, there is a purity implied in getting rid of your possessions. I’ve gotten rid of a boatload of physical objects, and I’m definitely neither pure nor simple as a result.
What if it isn’t particularly pure to toss something into a black hole and run away as fast as you can? What if it’s just a way of surviving? Or a way of giving up? A matter of foisting shit on other people or other systems, or setting things on fire and running away? What if there’s nothing particularly virtuous — or wrong — about living without things you thought you couldn’t live without?
When I started thinking about this, I went through my old journals and noted the kinds of things I have jettisoned since I started writing in a journal. There’s quite a variety. The physical things I have abandoned include not just trash and worn-out objects, but also unwanted gifts, accumulations of precious objects, sentimental artifacts, other people’s things I’m storing for them, and crafts and works of art I have created.
But the urge to abandon isn’t confined to the physical: I have also let go of activities, jobs, people, houses, and whole areas of the world. I have backed out of, walked away from, and tossed a wonderful variety of false starts, true starts, and even people, if I include everyone who has gone and died on me. And I have let go of things I lost and didn’t intend to lose, because things go wandering into what I call Loss Space and never re-emerge.
I suppose I could have a whole section of a book on those things, but also another section on how to do it, since people do like how-tos. Not just the usual bits about finding people or groups who will take your things away, or who would buy them, but how do you fling a Christmas gift into the car of someone who just told you he was leaving you for a mutual friend? How do you let go of a husband who had the absolute gall to go and die on you? What is the correct way to tell your beloved only child to come and take their things out of your basement? How do you walk out of a job you got a degree for, when you find out it wasn’t possible for you to do it? Is it like one of those movies where the heroes stride toward the camera with explosions behind them, or is it more like a homeless person climbing out of a dumpster and heading for the shadows?
What void do you fling things into, and then walk away? And what do you have left afterwards?
It would be a lot of fun to write.
I suspect it would also be a great project to avoid, so that I would get to work on the novel I have drafted. Always have some task around to avoid, that’s my motto. I have gotten a lot done in my life that way.